Delphi Digital is betting that Solana’s next major upgrade cycle will reposition the network as an “exchange grade” environment capable of supporting onchain order books that can realistically contend with centralized venues on latency, liquidity depth, and market structure. In a Jan. 20 post on X titled “2026 is the Year of Solana”, the research firm argued Solana’s 2026 roadmap is its “most aggressive upgrade cycle” yet, one that “overhaul[s] everything from consensus to infrastructure to become the decentralized Nasdaq.”
Why Delphi Digital Calls 2026 “The Year Of Solana”
Delphi framed the roadmap less as a grab bag of performance enhancements and more as a capital-markets push: “Solana’s roadmap is about transforming it into an exchange grade environment where a native onchain CLOB can viably compete with CEX latency, liquidity depth, and fairness. Here are all the upgrades making this possible.” In that view, shaving milliseconds matters only insofar as it produces predictable, enforceable execution outcomes for applications like high-frequency trading and central limit order books.
The centerpiece, Delphi wrote, is Alpenglow, a consensus redesign it called “the most significant protocol level change in Solana’s history.” The firm said Alpenglow introduces a new architecture built around Votor and Rotor, with Votor changing how validators reach agreement. Rather than “chaining multiple voting rounds together,” validators would aggregate votes offchain and “commit to finality in one or two rounds,” producing “theoretical finality in the 100-150 millisecond range, down from the original 12.8 seconds.”
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Delphi emphasized Votor’s parallel finalization paths as a resilience feature, not just a speed play. If a block gets “overwhelming support (80%+ stake)” it finalizes immediately; if support is between 60% and 80%, a second round triggers, and finality follows if that also clears 60%. The goal, Delphi argued, is to preserve finality even with unresponsive segments of the network.
Alpenglow also introduces what Delphi called a “20+20” resilience model: safety holds as long as no more than 20% of stake is malicious, while liveness persists even if another 20% is offline, “tolerat[ing] up to 40% of the network being either malicious or inactive while still maintaining finality.” Under this design, Proof of History is “effectively deprecated,” replaced by deterministic slot scheduling and local timers. Delphi said the upgrade is expected to roll out in early to mid 2026.
Delphi also pointed to Firedancer, Jump’s C++ validator client, as a structural upgrade aimed at reducing a long-standing operational risk. Solana has historically relied on a single client, now known as Agave, and Delphi described that “monoculture” as a central weakness because client-level faults can cascade into broader network halts.
Firedancer’s objective, Delphi said, is a deterministic, high-throughput engine that can process “millions of TPS with minimal latency variance.” Ahead of full readiness, Delphi highlighted “Frankendancer,” a transitional build that combines Firedancer’s networking and block production modules with Agave’s runtime and consensus components, as a bridge to “substantially” increased client diversity.
On infrastructure, Delphi spotlighted DoubleZero as a private fiber overlay for validators, likening its transmission profile to traditional exchange connectivity: “the same infrastructure traditional exchanges like Nasdaq and CME rely on for microsecond level transmission.” The argument is that as validator sets expand, propagation variance becomes the enemy of tight finality windows. By routing messages along “optimal paths” and supporting multicast delivery, Delphi said DoubleZero can narrow latency gaps across validators—an enabler for both Votor’s quorum formation and Rotor’s propagation design.
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Delphi also framed Solana’s block-building roadmap as a market-structure project. It described Jito’s BAM (Block Assembly Marketplace) as separating ordering from execution via a marketplace and privacy layer, with transactions ingested into TEEs so “neither validators nor builders can see raw transaction content before ordering takes effect,” reducing pre-execution behavior like frontrunning.
Harmonic, meanwhile, targets builder competition by introducing an open aggregation layer so validators can accept proposals from “multiple competing builders in real time,” with Delphi summarizing: “Think of Harmonic as a meta-market and BAM as a micro-market.”
Raiku rounds out the thesis by adding deterministic latency and programmable execution guarantees adjacent to Solana’s validator set, using Ahead-of-Time (AOT) transactions for pre-committed workflows and Just-in-Time (JIT) transactions for real-time needs—without modifying L1 consensus.
Delphi ultimately tied the technical roadmap to market demand: Solana’s spot trading gravity, the consolidation of onchain perps toward a handful of venues, and the need to reach performance parity with centralized platforms. It cited expectations for “new Solana native perps like Bulk Trade coming early next year,” and pointed to products like xStocks bringing “onchain equities directly to Solana,” arguing that liquidity and attention are consolidating toward a chain with faster settlement, better UX, and denser capital.
At press time, SOL traded at $127.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
